Real drug danger

Let's end hyperbolic warnings and focus on actual threats - like prescription pills.

Copyright 2014: Houston Chronicle

Updated 2:45 pm, Saturday, May 24, 2014

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Real drug danger

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Since its inception, the war on drugs has essentially been based on fear-mongering to children. Drugs will ruin your life! Buying drugs gives money to terrorists! One puff of a joint, a lifetime of consequences!

All these warnings have done little to reduce drug use, but they have instilled a deep sense of cynicism in far too many kids. With changes in drug laws across the country, perhaps it is time we started to tell children the truth: No one is going to die from overdosing on marijuana. Prescription painkillers are a different story.

In a story widely reported across Houston last week, an Aldine ISD senior was found dead in a hotel room after prom. All the facts aren't in yet, but signs point to overdosing on a mix of hydrocodone and alcohol ("Texts from girl's prom date hint she may have overdosed," Page B1, Tuesday).

A sad tale, but in the grand view she may have become just another statistic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose deaths have more than tripled since 1990. In 2010, 22,134 people in the United States died from a prescription drug overdose, with about 75 percent of those related to opiod painkillers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and methadone. That makes prescription pills one of the leading causes of death in the United States, killing more people than all illegal drugs combined. And for every death from painkillers, there are about 32 visits to the emergency room for misuse or abuse.

The cold, hard fact is that prescription pills are dangerous, and kids aren't necessarily the ones at fault when they end up in the wrong hands. After all, they're not the ones asking for them or prescribing them.

A growing baby boomer population, according to a recent study in Medical Care, has doctors handing out more prescription pills, especially painkillers. A burden falls on responsible adults and doctors to limit the use of these potentially deadly pills. But kids also have to be aware of the danger they face, too.

Yet it is all too easy for kids to ignore these warnings amidst the usual cacophony of moral panic aimed in their direction.

One week, parents are worried about kids putting Chapstick on their eyelids.The next week, an invented story about alcohol-soaked tampons. For decades, marijuana was literally treated as the devil's weed. All the adult overreactions blend together like the trombone voice of Charlie Brown's teacher. Kids can see through nonsense as well as anyone else, and learn to tune it out.

On the other hand, when anti-drug organizations make specific, rational arguments, kids listen.

Years of fact-based warnings about tobacco's carcinogenic properties - not to mention the wrinkles, addiction and expense - have resulted in sharp declines in teenage smoking, which is now at an all-time low. To put things in perspective, in 1996, more than 10 percent of eighth-grade students reported daily use of cigarettes. That number plummeted to less than 2 percent by 2012. For high school seniors, that number dropped from more than 22 percent to less than 10 percent. In fact, fewer teenagers smoke cigarettes today than use marijuana.

Facts get results; hyperbole gets mocked.

If we really care about keeping kids safe, anti-drug groups should make similar, fact-based arguments about other deadly drugs. There are plenty of reasons kids - and many adults - shouldn't smoke marijuana. But pills are a real danger. The high isn't good enough, and consequences can be deadly.

It is time to stop fear-mongering and instead start telling the truth.